Don't have an account?

Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Cynthia Simison: Can Memorial Day also be a time to look beyond the grief for our war dead?

simison family.JPG

World War II veteran R. Donald Simison, standing, left, is shown here in a 1944 photograph with his family, including his mother, Josephine, sister, Barbara, and father, Robert T. Simison in Northampton.
(The Republican | Submitted Photo)

Monday marked my first visit to our national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. and to the memorial to our veterans of the Korean War. I had gone to the National Mall with a friend, for a monuments tour.

The World War II Memorial was most important for me to visit as this 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches. It was on June 7, 1944, that my dad, who would have turned 98 in April, confronted war on a beachhead in Normandy, France.

He came home more than a year later and put away his memories with no talk of what he saw or did back then, no hint of any heroic acts. It was simply what a man of his time did. Only in the last years of his life did he share his stories of war and only then with a trusted historian, not with my brother and me. He died in 1991; I miss him every day.

As my friend, who happens to be a veteran, and I continued our monuments tour, we encountered wave after wave of veterans’ Honor Flight visitors from across the country, most of them aging and grizzled men in wheelchairs. We saw salutes, a few in tears, but most marked their visits in quiet respect of the memorials to those who didn’t come home from the places they’d been.

My friend and I talked about heroism and what embodies a hero. We talked about service in the military and the ways in which her service to our country brought fulfillment to her life.

At the Vietnam wall, I took the time to read some of the notes and letters, many of them left by school children, at the foot of each panel. One neatly typed message conveyed a thank-you for a soldier’s brave acts and an appreciation of his service, saying he would not be forgotten even though the writer knew nothing of who he was. It was signed, “Someone who cares.”

This Memorial Day, let us not forget the intent of our national observance; it was created in the years after the Civil War as Decoration Day, a time to decorate the graves of those lost in battle for both the Union and the Confederacy. Early in this 21st century, there evolved a National Moment of Remembrance to be marked at 3 p.m. each Memorial Day.

Holiday? To some, especially those who have lost a loved one on a battlefield, it hardly seems appropriate to describe Memorial Day as a holiday.

But, is it only a time to mourn? Cannot great lessons be learned from our collective past, from the experiences of those on battlefields here at home and around the world?
By honoring those who, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “gave the last full measure of devotion,” can we also celebrate our nation’s freedoms?

I believe my father shared his wartime memories at the end of his life as a means of ensuring his piece of our collective past is preserved for future generations; he had not been a glory seeker, just a 20-something-year-old bank teller who marched to the railroad station in downtown Northampton one afternoon with some of his high-school friends, off to basic training and eventually across the sea to England and on to France and Germany. From that morning on Omaha Beach, when he saw “bodies stacked like cord wood,” to a town in Germany where the “smell of death” was palpable, he made his way to the end of the war with barely a physical scratch.

The book which carries the memories of my dad and other Northampton veterans of World War II forward into history, “Touched with Fire,” by Allison Lockwood, uses the words of another veteran of another war – Oliver Wendell Holmes – in its title. Drawn from a speech which Holmes gave on a Memorial Day in the 1880s, its words bear repeating this weekend.

“So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly.”

Holmes honored our nation’s war dead, some of them men who had fallen by his side in the Civil War, but he also knew the day – this national observance – would be shared by many who had no memories of war. He looked beyond the grief for the dead on Memorial Day to find a meaning for those who are fortunate enough to live lives unblemished by war:

“Grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death – of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen , the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.”

The Veterans Memorial flagpole which stands outside Smith & Wesson headquarters in Springfield will be rededicated on Monday along with a nearby monument which was originally dedicated on Memorial Day in 1932. Smith & Wesson, a company which produced arms widely used in World Wars I and II, and its workers – almost a third of who are veterans – oversaw restoration of the flagpole and the monument; they plan a “Celebration of Heroes” to honor members of the U.S. military. It will be a good time to be “someone who cares.”

Cynthia G. Simison is managing editor of The Republican; she may be reached at csimison@repub.com.